


Occupying Space

by Areiton



Category: Supernatural
Genre: John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Pre-Series, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-10 21:15:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7861411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean have always shared space. The backseat of the Impala, a hundred thousand motel rooms, a lifetime, always wrapped around each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Occupying Space

Sam and Dean have spent their entire lives together. Wrapped around each other, living on top of each other, so close they occupy the same spaces. They’re two parts of the same whole, impossibly close and ridiculously co-dependent and happy. All of it boiling down to one unshakable truth.

They don't know _how_ to be alone.

 

*

There is a constant in Sam’s life. His first memories to his last, and all the ones between, they revolve around Dean. His first memory is gripping Dean’s hand and licking an ice cream cone on the back of the Impala while John burned a monster.

Even then, it was John. Not Dad. Not to Sam. Dean pressed closer as the smoke caught on the crisp autumn wind and Sam leaned into his brother and asked if they could have hot dogs for dinner.

_Sure, Sammy._

 

_**_

It made sense. They lived in a car, a life of nomadic danger. They're entire world began and ended with each other. They shared books and spoons, cups and toothbrushes, beds and a bag that held everything they owned. Matchbox cars and hunting knives and pillows and blankets. When they get along, they share happiness and laughter and when they fight they share bruises and ice packs and disapproving stares from John.

They share their memories and their disappointments and their tears. They share razors until Sam gets pissy about it and deodorant when Dean can’t find his and socks always because they seem to get eaten by the washing machine. They share plates of food until Dean gets big enough that John decides he needs his own, and desert after that, and they share crushes on girls and longing for something neither can put a name to and the deep abiding sense of loss when November 2nd rolls around and John gets drunk enough that he can’t stand, can’t function.

They share chores and they share inside jokes that Bobby doesn’t get. They share weapons and training techniques and research and a world that the rest of the world doesn’t understand and isn’t invited into.

They share a life, in a way that most people _can’t_.

They share every dream and secret and embarrassing moment, a life so stripped of privacy that they don't even realize it's not there until they aren't sharing space and breath.

 

***

He left. That's the thing that he tries to focus on, when rage at those missing years fills him. It's something he doesn't tell Dean because it's still a sore subject but it's the truth.

He left. He chose to walk away. He looked at the life they built, the one wrapped around hunting and his brother and never shall the two be separated and he couldn’t stay.

As much as he loved Dean, as much as he wanted to stay. He wanted out more. So he left.

He hated it. He didn’t realize how much, until he went back, but it always felt _off._

He had a roommate, before he met Jess, a kid named Steve, and he thought it was supposed to be the same. The way he was with Dean. He wasn’t sure how to create that kind of trust with a person he didn’t know, a person who wasn’t _Dean._

He was relieved, this kind of deep-seated gratefulness when he realized that Steve didn’t want or expect that. He barely even acknowledged Sam.

Later, when he looks back, it's not the things at Stanford that stand out in his memory. It's the empty Dean shaped space that Jess almost managed to fill, but not quite, not _right._

 

****

When Sam comes back, it feels like the world is whole. Like the piece that was missing is there again, a raw wound suddenly healed.

He doesn't have to drink to fall asleep, the sound of whiskey promises drowning out the silence where his brother’s rhythmic breathing should be.

Sam is cautious around him, and then, so wrecked by grief that he doesn’t have the capacity to be cautious, just needs the comfort of the familiar, to drown in the nearness of Dean, of the life he walked away from and that he suddenly, desperately, needs again.

 

*****

Motel rooms are big and empty and crowded and full and Dean loves that Sam, neat studious Sam, is a little cyclone that slams into the room and tears it apart piece by piece, until it is little more than a disaster zone that screams Sam and Dean is walking through it, walking through _Sam_. He bitches because of course he bitches but it's done fondly, with a smile in his eyes that doesn't reach his voice when Dean kicks over a stack of books on the way to the fridge and lands on a crumple of paper-- _that's research!--_ when he lands on the bed.  

Sam occupies space in a way that baffles and entrances Dean, and Dean is the only person Sam allows in.

 

******

Even with Lisa and Ben, he feels alone. It takes months to realize. The first few months are lost to grief and drink and rage that smashes against the warmth in Lisa’s bed and leaves him broken and guilty and withdrawn.

But it fades. It doesn't leave. The loss of Sam shapes him in a way that only the birth of Sam ever did. But it fades, becomes a thing he can manage, a functional wound.

The Walking wounded, Dean thinks, occasionally. That's what he will always be.

It's not bad. The noise helps. Living with people is _loud_ in a way he didn't expect. But he'll find himself alone, sometimes, Ben in his room and Lisa busy somewhere else in the house and he’ll be startled by the silence, by the space, by the sensation of turning around without running into Sam.

Even now, when he moves too quickly, he expects it to be met by his brother. When he brushes by Lisa in the bathroom, he doesn't always understand why it's not Sam.

When Ben sits, small and sulking over his homework by the truck while Dean fucks around under the hood, he doesn't expect his small form.

He realizes it abruptly.

Sam is still there. A Sam shaped hole in the fabric of his world. It's why _normal_ life doesn't fit right because it's trying to fit around Dean and a ghost that he can't shake and doesn't even want to.

 

*

 

They have to learn how to live again. Sam is different, and Dean is...lost. As much as he hated his brother being gone, it’s almost harder, to be back. It takes months, before he stops snapping at Sam for intruding on his space, before he learns how to sleep alone, but not, with the familiar tossing and turning of Sam in the other bed and the sprawl of his research.

Dean knows it’ll take time, but it grates his nerves. When Sam pushes into the bathroom to shave while Dean is showering. When Sam flicks a light on while Dean is still sleeping, or drops coffee next to Dean’s head with a grunted, _we need to go._

It feels familiar in a way that is completely foreign.

 

**

 

It feels foreign until it doesn’t. Until the day he wakes up and Sam is sweaty and panting in the door, smelly from his run and grinning at the sour face Dean tosses him and they slide into banter about breakfast and Dean snags Sam’s toothpaste a few seconds before Sam doesn’t, and get a bitchface for it, and they’re pushing and shoving, running into each other as they strap on their guns and slide knives away, and then Cas is there, and it’s _right._

It hits him, about a hundred miles down the road, while Sam frowns at his computer, his resting bitch face that makes Dean grin.

It feels foreign, until it doesn’t.

And it doesn’t.

 

***

 

When Sam was six, a kid in his class told him that one day, Dean would leave him. That he’d move out, go to college, marry some pretty girl. And Sam would be left with their dad.

It was the first time Sam ever got into a fight at school, and Dean had dragged his brother away from the other kid, while Sam fought to get back to him, fought to continue ripping the kid apart, screaming the whole time, _you’re wrong!_

John was on a hunt, so Dean dragged Sam back to their shitty hotel, sat him down on the bed and cleaned him up, while Sam sat their, vibrating with fury, silent tears pouring down his cheeks.

Dead didn’t ask about it. Didn’t need to. Sam would tell him when he was ready.

It took until they were in bed, Sam curled around Dean, clinging in a very un-Sam-like manner, that he finally muttered, _He said you were gonna leave me._

That yanked Dean right back into the land of wakefulness, shaking off the sleep he’d been sliding into like a bucket of cold water.

_He lied, Sam. I’d never leave you._

Sam crumpled then, at the utter conviction in Dean’s voice and the knowledge that he never would. He clung to Dean, and sobbed, and Dean shushed him, hugged him close.

 

****

Sometimes, John would watch them. Dean would catch him looking and he’d go still and startled. It was one thing for strangers to look at them, with that kind of curious, kind of disgusted fascination. He was seventeen and he knew what they looked like.

Brothers so wrapped up in each other they didn’t need the rest of the world. Brothers who needed each other, and tripped over unhealthy more often than not. Brothers who let the world pass them by, happy in each other.

John sent Dean to Bobby to hunt, after that.

It was the one and only time Dean rebelled. He hotwired a car in the junkyard and wound up in Maine, at the shitty motel John and Sam were in while John hunted a werewolf. Dean snagged Sam and drove back to Sioux Falls. He ignored Bobby’s questioning looks, and when John arrived two days later, bloody and beat to hell and wild eyed with worry, Dean hadn’t even looked up. Just continued helping Sam with the lore he was translating, and stirring the mac and cheese they were having for lunch.

The message was clear though. The warning was clearer.

Dean took Sam and retreated to Bobby’s but if it John tried to separate them again, he’d vanish, and John would never find them.

He never tried again.

 

****

When they retire, it’s together. A tiny house on the outskirts of Lawrence. Jody comes by and heckles them. So does Claire. She asks Cas about it, about why they are still living with Sam. Cas shrugs and glances back at where they’re standing, always close. They orbit each other, still. It’s impossible to love Dean, without accounting for Sam, for the Sam shaped space that is attached to Dean.

He shrugs and he smiles and says, _they’re happier together._

It was more than that though. It’s that, even now, after all the years and the way they’d grown up and around each other, after everything they all had been through, the brothers still didn’t know how to be without each other.

It was a skill they would never learn.

 

******

 

Sam was Dean’s and Dean was Sam’s and they shared space and air and lives, so seamless that it was as easy as breathing, as _natural_ as breathing. Neither considered anything else, because how do you consider living without a piece of yourself?

Necessity and poor life choices had led to it, in the past, and both knew it wasn’t their life. It was a piece of normal that they didn’t want.

A piece that had been whittled away by years of killing and Hell and Purgatory and everything else, and mostly.

It was simply the way they lived. Wrapped up in each other. Unhealthy and obsessive and codependent. And happy.

 


End file.
